Listening session in preview at Ircam: Solaris, a fiction France Culture-director Christophe Hocké

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“Atypical format, changing and poetic, the fiction “Solaris” is to be listened to as a song as much as a poignant love story. »
The psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the station in orbit around the mysterious planet Solaris. In contact with the living ocean that covers the planet, humans are subject to strange phenomena: delusions, hallucinations, suicides. Very shortly after his arrival, Kelvin wakes up alongside his wife, who died ten years earlier…
This new adaptation for France Culture leaves a lot of room for sound work, associated with music and voices.

SOLARIS based on the screenplay by Andrei Tarkovski and the novel by Stanislas Lem
Directed by: Christophe Hocké
Adaptation: Camille Azais
Original music: Nicolas Worms
With Audrey Bonnet: Harey
Vladislav GalardChris Kelvin
Clement Bresson: Snaut
Adama Diop: Sartorius
Daniel Kenigsberg: The Father
and Andrea Brusque
with the Chœur accentus, Laurence Equilbey Artistic and musical director,
Choir director Guillemette Daboval
Vocal coach: Benjamin Laurent
Singers: Marie Picaut, Emilie Husson, Mathieu Montagne, Alexandre Jamar, Marion Vergez-Pascal, Saskia Salembier, Pierre Corbel, Matthieu Heim
Sound effects: Sophie Bissantz
Assistant director: Pablo Valero
Sound recording, editing and mixing: Djaïsan Taouss and Etienne Colin

Solarisreleased in 1962is the third film by director Andrei Tarkovsky: it follows Andrei Rublev, a feature film which had won its director first international recognition. Psychologist Kris Kelvin, played by Donatas Banionis, is sent to the station in orbit around the mysterious planet Solaris. There, in contact with the living ocean that covers the planet, humans are subject to strange phenomena: delusions, hallucinations, suicides. Very shortly after his arrival, Kelvin wakes up alongside his wife Harey, who died ten years earlier. Tarkovsky takes this situation, which he borrows from the novel Solaris of the Polish science fiction author Stanislas Lem, in all its philosophical and spiritual dimensions. Harey’s return from the dead is Tarkovsky’s way of materializing the idea that time is reversible, or “at any rate, that it doesn’t flow in a straight line.” Kris Kelvin, at the cost of suspending his scientific and rational mind, manages to accept his past, to recover his memories and to live with them, as if time had been abolished.
Solaris won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972 and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. It is soon followed by the masterpiece Stalkerin which Tarkovsky develops some of the themes covered in Solaris.

Adaptation and production
We are not the first to propose a reinterpretation of Solaris, this masterpiece by Tarkovsky. Perhaps because the story of Kris and Harey was elevated by the filmmaker to the rank of universal myth: the story of a being haunted by the death of a loved one, and who seems to have taken with him into the dead all of Kris’s sentient capacity, to others, to nature, to himself.
On the radio, the sound work, associated with music and voices, makes it possible to give birth to dreamlike material, to probe memories, to evolve freely in the unconscious – as Tarkovsky does masterfully in his films. Our adaptation starts from Tarkovski’s desire to purify to the extreme the narrative framework of Solaris to make a poem of it. For France Culture, we only keep a few scenes carried by a minimal cast, and we leave a lot of room for the sound material. From the start of the project, it seemed obvious to Christophe Hocké that the ocean was one of the main characters in the story, and had to “take shape”. Incarnated by eight singers, this mysterious being who knows how to bring ghosts back to life is here transformed into a set of spectral voices on fragments of texts borrowed from Stanislas Lem.
Our fiction Solaris is thus an atypical, changing and poetic format, to be listened to as a song as much as a poignant love story. Camille Azaïs and Christophe Hocké

The music
It was fascinating to transform this long metaphysical poem with Christophe Hocké into a sort of synthetic symphony with choirs, or even a spatial oratorio. The composition involves two sound masses that accompany and complement each other: on the one hand, an “orchestra” made up of various electric keyboards, synthesizers, effects, samples, recorded in the studio and superimposed on each other, with everything allow computer-aided composition techniques. On the other hand, a group of eight solo singers and lyrical singers, without hierarchy or distinction other than the tessitura, taking on the role of the Ocean of the planet Solaris.
The writing of the chorus seeks to reconstitute the image very present in Solaris of the invisible connections between the beings that we have known, dispersed in the magma of the human brain, of which a figure stands out from time to time but whose sharpness, presence, is never completely assured. I wanted to compose a music which is not intact, because the characters of the film and the novel of Stanislas Lem are not it. The vocal sound textures that we sought, with the choirmaster Guillemette Daboval and the artists of the Accentus choir, are therefore closer to blurring, texture, than sharpness and sharpness, as if their voices came from the depths of the unconscious, or of a barely foreseen future.
The human voices and the oscillators thus come together in a musical breath that I also wanted to be deeply expressive and epic, reminiscent of the movement of the Ocean and the Psyche, elusive, painful and magnetic. Nicholas Worms

Andrei Tarkovskyson of the poet Arséni Tarkovski, was born on April 4, 1932 in Zavraje in the USSR.
His first work, Ivan’s Childhood, received the Golden Lion in 1962 at the Venice Film Festival. It then spins Andrei Rublev, completed in 1966 but screened only five years later, after very long vicissitudes with Soviet censorship. During the shooting of this film, he meets the actress Larissa Pavlovna Igorkina, whom he marries in second marriage and with whom he will have a son in 1970, Andrei. He then starts shooting again and realizes, with increasing difficulty, Solaris in 1972, The mirror in 1974 and Stalker in 1979. In Italy, he turns travel time and Nostalghia in 1983, which received a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
His latest work is the film Sacrifice, shot in Sweden during the summer of 1985 and edited during the sudden illness that besets him shortly afterwards. During the last year of his life, he manages to complete the book The Sealed Time. He died in Paris on December 29, 1986.

Christophe Hocke directs projects combining theatre, documentary and music. He has been a producer of radio dramas at Radio France since 2015.
His work in radio focuses primarily on the creation of musical fiction where music is a constituent element of the narration.
He proposes and experiments with different forms with various ensembles and musical styles.
He has performed several public fiction concerts for France Culture with the Orchester Philharmonique de Radio France: The Last Jungle Book by Yann Apperry It’s okay ! October Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Apollinaire – Poems of peace and war, La Fontaine – Fables. And with the Orchester National de France: Peter Pan or the boy who didn’t grow up.
He has also produced Tram 83 by Fiston Muanza Mujila with Adama Diop and the composer and musician Mocke, Michael Jackson – Man in the mirror by Camille Azaïs, musical series broadcast live, Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka with Micha Lescot and the group Syd Matters.

Camille Azais, born in 1984, is an author and art critic. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, she writes on contemporary art for specialized magazines, catalogs and institutions. She is also the author in 2019 of the soap opera The Man in the Mirror for France Culture, directed by Christophe Hocké. In 2020, she won the Encouragements of the ArtCena Creation Assistance Commission, for Minimal, the first dramatic text centered on the figure of the founder of a radical ecological movement. In 2022, his first book was published by Tombolo Presses, a fictional essay entitled Homemakers. She also conducts long-term research supported in 2022 by the National Center for Plastic Arts on contemporary art in a rural context. Life choices, radicalism, the condition of women in the face of ecological disaster are the themes that run through her work and are at the center of the novel. Triticium, in writing. She has been teaching at the Higher School of Arts and Media of Caen since 2019.

Nicholas Worms lives and works in Paris, where he was born in 1993. Trained at the National Conservatory, since 2012 he has received commissions from institutions such as the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Opéra National de Paris, the Opéra du Rhin, France Culture, and has been performed by numerous symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles and soloists. At the same time, he collaborates with many groups and artists from the Parisian and international pop/rock scene: Moonsters, UTO, Mocke, Benjamin Clementine, Yael Naim… He participates in the soundtracks of films by Quentin Dupieux, Christophe Honoré , Eric Judor, composes and performs on the piano for the choreographic pieces of Radhouane El Meddeb and Bruno Bouché, signs the music for several radio dramas of France Culture, as well as many film-concerts and performances.
Since 2016, he has entrusted his compositions to performers from diverse backgrounds, brought together by the desire to decompartmentalize musical styles and practices, and therefore freely explores the intersections caused by his writing. The idea of ​​“music-fiction” emerges, and of a musical creation inventing its own formats and modes of representation.
He is currently working on various productions embodying this vision: the show The Phantom Islandthe musical series Flot, and Numin, a space opera in collaboration with the artist Eden Tinto Collins.

emphasis is a chamber choir founded by Laurence Equilbey 30 years ago, very involved in the a cappella repertoire, contemporary creation, oratorio and opera. accentus performs in the biggest French and international concert halls and festivals and collaborates with prestigious conductors, soloists and orchestras. A true reference in the world of vocal music, accentus becomes in 2018 the first National Vocal Arts Center (Paris Île-de-France, Normandy), appointed by the Ministry of Culture.

Solaris will be broadcast on Sunday January 22 at 8 p.m. on France Culture in

Theater and Company